LTI Advantage tool configuration: any way to open in a new (_blank) tab by default?

[phanley]

We are piloting an LTI Advantage tool that is giving some users trouble if the LTI launch doesn't happen in a new tab (i.e. the tool content is rendered in the Canvas frame).  While checking the "open in a new tab" for every link fixes the issue they're having, obviously it would be better to be able to set that at the tool level as is possible with the LTI 1.1 api, i.e. setting

"windowTarget": "_blank"

 in the tool's link_selection, etc section.

The documentation doesn't list any parameters that would set the target _blank behavior unfortunately - is anyone aware of something I'm missing?

[akshya]

Hey! We had the same question, can you tell us if you've received any updates from Canvas on this?

-Akshya

[phanley · Accepted solution]

It turned out that not all of the placement options are in that doc,  you can still set windowTarget and the others that work with 1.1 tools

As a test I tried this:

$ curl -H \"Authorization: Bearer {api key}\" \
-X PUT "https://{instance}.instructure.com/api/v1/accounts/1/external_tools/{tool_id}" \
-F 'course_navigation[windowTarget]=_blank' | jq .'course_navigation'  
// returns
{
  "enabled": true,
  "default": "enabled",
  "placement": "course_navigation",
  "message_type": "LtiResourceLinkRequest",
  "windowTarget": "_blank",
}

And the URL subsequently had ?display=borderless appended to it (and more importantly, it opened in a new tab when clicked)

Unfortunately if the tool is already installed, this is how you have to update it (1.1 or 1.3) as far as I know, but when installing the LTI key you should be able to add windowTarget to the JSON config under extensions.settings.placements i.e.

"placements":[  
   {  
    "text":"Course Navigation Placement",
    "enabled":true,
    "windowTarget": "_blank",
// etc.